Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness Retrospective

The Adrenaline Vault’s editor has penned a retrospective article to the very first official Ultima title, which also doubles as a first-time experience, since, by the author’s own admission, he had never gone back to the first Ultima titles but only played the latter entries. Here’s a snip from this interesting read:

There are a few precautions to take before playing Ultima today. First, make an all-Rush mix tape. Second, read the manual. Not only because you want to know what’s going on, but also because it’s fabulously written. The words are the skin draped over the black-and-white frame of the game. Richard Garriott’s descriptions put color and life in something that’s primitive as a stick-figure skeleton. It’s not hyperbole to say you’d be missing half of the experience if you skip the manual.

While there’s a different action mapped to every letter key, the controls are actually easy to grasp. It helps that the combat and magic system is simplistic. Your lone hero has two options: attack or cast the single offensive spell. With no mana, all spells (aside from the random (prayer) spell) are bought from stores and cast like disposable scrolls. It’s much more playable then the early Might and Magic games, which require you to look in a manual to compare gear for each of your six party members. Ultima I’˜s simplicity keeps the game within the confines of its technological abilities.

Ultima I includes some pretty odd design choices. For instance, there’s no such thing as a maximum HP score. You never heal; you just add more numbers to your current HP. You can gain HP either by buying them from a king or dungeon diving. When you exit a dungeon, you regain a certain amount of HP depending on the monsters you’ve killed. If you do it right, you gain a net profit of HP. Yes, you actually grind dungeons for HP as well as XP.

Speaking of dungeons, there are dozens of them around the world, but they all function in the same way. Monsters are randomly generated based on a monster table, which is dependent upon which level you’re on. There are no unique monsters or treasure in any dungeon, leaving all of them identical except for layout. Even this can be changed with (Ladder Down) and (Ladder Up) spells, which make handy portals. Dungeon crawls of this era tend to be tedious, but those in Ultima I are eminently approachable.